Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Costa, Mário J
• Garrido, Nuno D
• Marinho, Daniel A
• Santos, Catarina C

Titel

How Much the Swimming Performance Leading to Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games Was Impaired Due to the Covid-19 Lockdown?

Ist Teil von

• Journal of sports science & medicine, 2021-12, Vol.20 (4), p.714-720

Ort / Verlag

Turkey: Journal of Sports Science and Medicine

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Free E-Journal (出版社公開部分のみ）

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• The aim of this study was to analyze the progression and stability in the performance of world-ranked swimmers from 2015 to 2020, and the impairment induced by the COVID-19 lockdown. An observational retrospective design over five consecutive competitive seasons was selected. FINA's male Top-50 who were qualified for the Tokyo Olympic Games were considered in freestyle, backstroke, backstroke, and butterfly events. A total of 515 male swimmers and 2060 season-best performances were analyzed. All data was retrieved from two open-access and public websites (Swimrankings and Swimcloud). Repeated measures ANOVA followed by the Bonferroni test was performed to analyze the variation between seasons. Stabilization in performance was assessed using spearman correlation coefficients. A significant improvement in performance ≈0.5-2.5% was found in most of the strokes and race distances until the 2018-2019 season. The 2020 lockdown impaired the performance by 1-2%. Moderate to high associations were found in the 2017-2018 season when considering the 2019-2020 performance. The breaststroke was the only stroke with a moderate-high stability (r > 0.40) in all race distances considering the overall time period. It can be concluded that world-ranked swimmers' performance was impaired by 1-2% due to the COVID-19 lockdown, returning to levels that were reached two years earlier.